Steam is streets ahead of Xbox Live when it comes to number of players

Steam has just revealed a load of fresh stats concerning the popularity of the gaming platform, showing that it has way more users than Xbox Live – and almost as many as PlayStation Network (PSN).

According to the statistics revealed by Valve at the Casual Connect event in Seattle, Steam has 33 million daily active players, and no less than 67 million monthly active players (i.e. players who dive into a game at least once per month).

The latter figure eclipses Xbox Live’s 53 million monthly active players, and comes very close to PSN which has around 70 million.

Valve had a number of other figures to share, including the total number of users registered with the service which is now 125 million. The firm also noted that Steam set a new record for concurrent users – i.e. gamers playing simultaneously – with a figure of 14 million, not far off double the peak number seen in 2015 (8.4 million), just a couple of years ago.

That certainly points to brisk growth, further underlined by the fact that Steam has accumulated some 27 million paying users since the beginning of last year.

Asia has also witnessed impressive growth, and Asian gamers now represent 17% of Steam’s worldwide sales compared to just a few percent only a couple of short years ago.

Social platform

All these statistics were highlighted by GeekWire, incidentally, as were many of Valve’s PR slides for the service at the big Casual Connect presentation, which stressed Steam’s value as a ‘massive social network’ of gamers, and also the strengths of PC gaming: openness and innovation, and not just the consumption of games, but creation (i.e. the modding scene).

Valve also boasted about the variety of games on Steam, in terms of casual through to hardcore games, and different genres from shooters to point-and-click adventures.

As we saw last week, the new darling of Steam is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which set a new record as the most-played non-Valve game ever with a peak player count of 481,000 – a figure only eclipsed by Valve’s own Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2.